Sibelius. Britten.Brahms

The roots of the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra date back to 1790 and the founding of the Musical Society of Turku. The oldest orchestra in Finland – indeed, one of the oldest in the world – the Turku Philharmonic was adopted by its host city in 1927. At that time it had twenty-nine musicians, whereas today it boasts seventy-four. Leif Segerstam has been its Artistic Director and Principal Conductor since 2012. The orchestra’s in-house composers are Mikko Heiniö and Anders Hillborg.
The orchestra has been on tour to Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Germany, Hungary and China. It released its first recording in 1979. Favourite Finnish Classics (1995) and Karita’s Christmas (2002) both merited a platinum disc. Conductor Juha Kangas and the Turku Philharmonic won Finland’s EMMA award for Classical Album of the Year for their recording Transient Moods – Rajatiloja, released in 2009 and featuring music by Pehr Henrik Nordgren.
Side by side with their weekly symphony concerts, the orchestra’s chamber music ensembles perform in the historical venues of Turku and the beautiful surrounding archipelago. The orchestra also puts on concerts for the whole family and regularly takes part in opera productions. In addition, the Turku Philharmonic is engaged in open access and is leading the way in Finland in the field of internet concert broadcasts. The orchestra streams live concerts on its website on a monthly basis.

Johannes Brahms began work on his First Symphony on the advice of Robert Schumann. The symphony was written over the course of fourteen years – from 1862 to 1876. Brahms had never spent so long working on any other opus: his desire to compose a symphony worthy of his great predecessors – Schumann and Beethoven in particular – provided an additional degree of responsibility.
Brahms’ First is sometimes referred to as “Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony.” And, indeed, the music does move “from darkness into light” in the manner of Beethoven. In the first movement one can sense a free spirit and the resolve “to seize destiny by the throat” while the second, written in a very distant tonality, seems to flow in a different reality and concludes with an unearthly violin solo. The third movement is a scherzo that sharply breaks off with the classical tradition. In the introduction to the finale the expansive theme of the French horn cuts through the gloom like a ray of light. The prototype of this theme was a pastoral melody that Brahms had heard in the Alps and immediately sent to Clara Schumann together with the words “High in the mountains, and deep in the valley, I greet you thousands of times!”

Jean Sibelius’ symphonic poem The Bard was first performed on 27 March 1913 in Helsinki at a concert of the Philharmonic Society. The composer himself took to the conductor’s stand. It is a typically Finnish laconic piece and, as the title would suggest, is dedicated to an epic poet of antiquity. A solo harp appears in the place of the kantele (a kind of Finnish folk zither), although there are no actual archaic features in the music of The Bard. This forces us to suspect that Sibelius created an image of a contemporary writer, providing his own response to the “symphonic self-portrait” of Richard Strauss in the latter’s Ein Heldenleben. Strauss composed the poem about his own self and gave the score a significantly detailed programme. In turn, Sibelius composed a symbolist piece filled with magical pantheism. His bard does not belong to himself, he is not interested in the momentary and he draws his inspiration from an ancient “memory pool.” The measured swaying of the strings, shaded by the moans of the oboe, conjures up an image of the dead waves of the Tuonela (Finnish mythology’s analogy of the Greek River Styx), while the brief and vivid culmination resounds like the powerful voice of nature.

Benjamin Britten completed his Cello Symphony in early May 1963. Of all his works composed for Mstislav Rostropovich, this is the greatest. The premiere took place on 12 March 1964 in Moscow. Rostropovich performed the piece under the baton of the composer.
Why was this cello concerto given the title of “symphony”? Here the path had been shown by Sergei Prokofiev, who back in 1952 had composed a work in a similar genre for Rostropovich – his Symphony-Concerto for Cello and Orchestra.
The most “modern” movement in Britten’s symphony is the first. The music is harsh and angular with constant changes in the sound quality and calls between the cello and the wind instruments.
In the subsequent movements, traditions appear more and more powerfully. The troubled scherzo, in which the cello at times joins in the tempestuous whirlwind, at others it “lives in its own time” and brings to mind the fantastical scherzos of the romantics (the degree to which it sounds fantastical depends to a large extent on the performers.) The third movement is the cello’s tragic and beautiful monologue that leads into a cadenza. As the trumpets join in, the Passacaglia begins, unexpectedly sunny and almost popular in terms of its style; possibly this kind of finale was also suggested by Prokofiev.
Anna Bulycheva